Friday, May 7, 2010

Suddenly, at least in parts of the blogosphere, it's hip to be old — a paradoxical twist for a youth-obsessed nation that injects, pulls and carves away any semblance of age. The "olds" (as sites like Gawker.com dub those old enough to remember rotary phones) are the subject of Facebook fan pages, YouTube shows, Twitter feeds and even fashion blogs.

Why is our youth-obsessed society suddenly so fascinated with the 65-plus set. For one thing, they are almost exotic creatures in our fractured modern lives, glimpsed only on major holidays.

To Mrs. G's family, whom we see mostly on Thanksgiving and Christmas, I'm known as Crazy Old Uncle Gordon. An honorific due my station in life and one I am very proud of!

Please enjoy the rest of the article.

Us Olde Phartes have something the whippersnappers who propel pop culture don't: a functional attention span. If we can just remember where we put it...

This is the good news: many of the world's most powerful, hurtful, wretched old men will soon be dead.

Does that sound cruel? Unkind? I might be OK with that. In fact, I might very much be in the mood to not really mind at all if a whole slew of these nefarious creatures of sociospiritual corrosion were to, say, spontaneously combust, or be struck by lightning, or perhaps accidentally fall into a giant, roiling vat of Astroglide and turpentine and a million duplicitous prayers. Whoops! Sorry, Monsignor!

When Benedict dies, he will have the pleasure of standing before whatever furious God he believes in, to answer for how it was that he knew for undeniable fact that one -- if not dozens -- of his priests repeatedly molested, abused and/or raped young children for decades, and he did nothing to stop it. How much does God believe the pope's argument that Vatican PR trumps pedophilia? Joe Ratzinger, 82, will soon find out.

Over here, we find far too many timeworn members of the U.S. Supreme Court, a majority of whom firmly believe that giant corporations are very much complete, entitled humans, but gay people most certainly are not.

But perhaps none of these fine and soulless charlatans appears as noticeably miserable, as lost, as openly insulting to the human spirit as the wretched leaders of the Mormon Church in Utah. There, I said it.

Translation: To the old, powerful men of the various churches and archaic institutions, to those that hold us back and demean the spirit in a thousands different ways, the message is clear enough: You will be gone very soon, right along with much of the enormous black cloud of fear and joylessness you carry.

Hallelujah and A-men, brothers and sisters! Enjoy the rest of the column.

Click to embiggen

There seems to be a strong sentiment in Congress that the only constitutional right suspected terrorists have is the right to bear arms.

I absolutely support the 2d Amendment as an individual right for law-abiding citizens to own firearms, but anyone espousing that suspected terrorists should be allowed to buy guns is so shit-for-brains they'd try to pull an armed robbery at a gun show.

Never thought I'd see the day where I'd support a monarchy, but after what an election "tie" did to this country, Britain might just want to restore Her Majesty's power before letting their courts decide the winner or allow them to build some sort of coalition.

...

Everyone got excited that this might be the year the Liberal Democrats (who are mildly liberal and very dysfunctional -- like our Democrats) did something at the polls. But as usual, it was all a tease and they've managed to barely increase their vote and not increase their seats.

Gordon Brown, who combines the charisma of Dukakis and the glower of Nixon into one unpopular package led a Labour Party that had exhausted itself after 16 years of governing to an abysmal performance of just over a quarter of the vote.

And the Tories, led by longtime aspirant David Cameron, who conservative papers laughably tried to turn into a "Hope" poster, gained votes, mostly because Labour lost them, but have come up well-short of what is needed for a majority.

So nobody really wins -- a hung Parliament.

...

At least Lizzie has some idea of how things should work (I'd say Charles would be good at the job too, but it's etched in stone somewhere that Charles will never be King). Couldn't do worse than Tony Blair.

Thursday, May 6, 2010

So the next time you are in line at the gunshop and Osama bin Laden is in front of you with a full shopping cart, remind him to use the cash back card because he is not allowed to use the frequent flier miles.

So here's how Dr. George Rekers, prominent anti-gay activist, professor of psych at the University of South Carolina, and founding member of the Family Research Council (motto: "George Rekers? We don't know any George Rekers"), apparently wants us to think it all went down:

Just set your drink down and go...

Update:

Don't pick up that drink just yet.

Anti-gay psychiatrist needed male callboy to help him ‘hoist his sack’

Following up on Fixer's post, here's some figures on bird deaths from Media Matters in the wake of George Will's asinine 'statistics' about wind farms:

Number of bird deaths from wind farms relatively small compared to other causes. According to the most recent figures provided to Media Matters from the American Bird Conservancy, whom Will cited in his Newsweek column, the number of birds killed in the United States every year because of striking windmills is relatively small compared to other causes:

CAUSE - BIRD DEATHS

Building strikes - 100 million - 1 billion

Car strikes - 200 - 300 million

Communication towers - 4 - 50 million

Power lines - 75 million

Cats - 365 million (1 million per day)

Wind farms - 100,000 - 300,000

Gee, they left out Thanksgiving and Christmas. And chickens. And ducks, geese, pheasants, and other game birds.

By the way, the way birds get killed by power lines is they shit on them and get electrocuted up the arse. The last nanosecond of life must be a doozie!

I will add to those figures if I ever get my hands on that damn screeching Steller's jay that hangs around here. Since he can fly and I can't, fat chance.

I'm-- I'm so sorry if this is disjointed (WHOOOSH) or confusing (WHOOSH), but-- I find myself the middle of a disaster of unprecedented proportions (WHOOOSH) and -- oh the humanity -- I'm having a hard time understanding how we progressives (WHOOOSH) (WHOOOSH) could ever let this happen!?

You see, I live in Southern California... just north of the Tehachapi Pass Wind Farm... and this morning a lipstick lesbian biker gang lost control of their motorcycles and CRASHED into one of the turbines and now...

That these guys are continuing to beat the waterboarding-and-torture drum, while Faisal Shahzad is singing like a canary even AFTER having his Miranda rights read, just shows that for them, the whole Bushian torture-and-military-tribunal thing isn't about our safety, it's about a bunch of impotent old men being able to feel that they can still get it up.

Surprising absolutely nobody, repuglicans decline to charge fellow rethug who lied, cheated, stole, and abused his office, family, and constituents in order to satisfy his illicit and pathetic adulterous lust on the taxpayer dime.

For three decades, former Marine-turned-Rastafarian Joseph Diliberti has lived on his three acres of paradise deep in rural eastern San Diego County: building clay dwellings, playing his flute, reading Thoreau ("I went into the woods because I wished to live deliberately") and radiating peace and harmony.

But six years ago when the local fire district sent him a bill for $27,552 for cutting down what firefighters characterized as fire-prone weeds on his property, he declined to pay, just as Thoreau refused to pay his delinquent poll taxes.

Go read.

Shorter: Fuckin' with an old hippie. Fire suppression is important in California, but this is bureaucratic government interference of the worst kind, from sending a private contractor onto someone's land to threatening him.

I guess sometimes, just sometimes, the teabaggers are right about government.

"It's the iPolice," said Steve Meister, a former Los Angeles County deputy district attorney. "This whole thing appears, rightly or wrongly, to be law enforcement doing the bidding of a private company."

*Cinco de Mayo: Sort of a Mexican St. Paddy's Day, except that while everybody's Irish on St. Paddy's Day, Anglos don't want to be Mexican on Cinco de Mayo. Another excuse to populate the roads with an excess of amateur drunk drivers.

This battle has also been joined in the world of sports. On one side is Major League Baseball’s Arizona Diamondbacks. Owned by state Republican moneyman Ken Kendrick, the team has drawn protestors to parks around the country. On the other side, we now have the Phoenix Suns. On Tuesday the news came forth that tomorrow on Cinco de Mayo, the team would be wearing jerseys that say simply Los Suns. Team owner Robert Sarver said, after talking to the team, that this will be an act of sartorial solidarity against the bill. Their opponent, the San Antonio Spurs have made clear that they support the gesture.

I don't know a damn thing about basketball other than it seems to be a game played mostly by tall black guys, but here's hoping Los Suns kick those Texass's asses!

Meanwhile, Limbaugh and other right-wingers also went cuckoo over the failed car-bombing in New York City. "I wonder if [the] SUV had an Obama sticker on it?" Limbaugh said. "Notice how quickly they got it out of Times Square before anybody could hop and maybe see an Obama 2012 bumper sticker on the damn car." Referring to suspect Faisal Shahzad, he added, "Of course, he's a Democrat. Who knows how many times he voted and where." Anything to tie the president to terrorists, right? And before Shahzad's arrest was announced, several conservative bloggers suggested the NYC plot was the work of leftists looking for a big May Day blast, with one writing, "So, we have the suspicious explosion of an oil rig in the gulf that happened the day before Lenin's birthday (Earth Day) and now we have an attempted attack on May Day, another day celebrated by left wing communists." What a busy week for the left: destroying the Gulf and attacking New York City.

Five minutes. I want five minutes naked in a steel cage with Limpbaugh. I need five minutes because I'll be laughing at his weenie for four. I'll use the fifth to turn him into a physically spineless jellyfish, though I'm afraid it's beyond me to make him as smart as one.

You little retard, or ve vill zap you again! Late for work but this is truly disturbing:

Some may say this is the result of poor training but the reality is that the Judge Rotenberg Center and places like it, are not there to help the kids, they are warehouses. Places the families can leave their problem kids when they no longer want them. Titticut Follies for kids.

... You would think that someone who spent half a decade in a cage with no rights whatsoever in the defense of this nation and our laws and legal tradition and way of life, would have the slightest bit of respect for the rule of law. You would, of course, be wrong.

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

It is not too off the mark to state that the North Koreans are batshit crazy. I also suspect that in any sort of military exchange, North Korea has less to lose. A conflict won't do any good to the South's economy, while the North is about as poor as they can get. The North Korean Army could fire off a bunch of shells from their emplaced artillery and wreak havoc in Seoul, which is within artillery range.

...

Nothing can be gained from another war on the Korean Peninsula. If the South wants to retaliate for the sinking of their ship, they should put pressure on the Chinese, who are the North's sole life support at this point. Our pal Misfit is right, the North has nothing to lose anymore. Our 7th Cav and 51st Wing, along with any Marine Corps units we have there would be nothing but a speed bump to North Korean infantry and artillery, hopefully able to be stopped before they reached Pusan (read the history of the Korean War). The civilian casualties would be horrendous.

The pictures on the Rentboy.com profile show a shirtless young man with delicate features, guileless eyes, and sun-kissed, hairless skin. The profile touts his "smooth, sweet, tight ass" and "perfectly built 8 inch cock (uncut)" and explains he is "sensual," "wild," and "up for anything"—as long you ask first. And as long as you pay ...

Click to embiggen

Tell you what, motherfuckers, when dead people are left to rot in the sun because of the incompetence of the federal government, when corpses are floating in the streets, when the President passively ignores the pleas of the governors of Gulf Coast states, when entire neighborhoods have been physically destroyed, when the federal government strands tens of thousands of people without food or water, when the federal government starts to blame the local governments, when the President praises the work of a failed, incompetent bureaucrat while a major city rots, then you can say that this is Barack Obama's "Katrina."

But until this happens, good, sweet conservative bags of fuck who need so desperately to drag this president down, the Gulf of Mexico oil leak is a corporate-created disaster, and it actually serves to demonstrate, starkly, and with a semen-like sheen, as if the ocean floor is in the midst of a prolonged sweet crude ejaculation, the utter failure of deregulation and the bullshit notion that capitalistic enterprises can police themselves when it comes to safety and environmental standards, whether it was, in this case, BP or Transocean or whoever. In other words, once again, as with so many things, this is about your ideology belly-flopping, much like, you know, when Katrina showed how years of neglect of the levees would lead to a nightmare.

Yes, some day soon, a man with his Gulf Shores timeshare, probably a proud and loyal teabagger, will look out over his balcony during the two weeks a year he takes his family on vacation and see the bits of black that are rolling up onto the shore. And he'll wonder, even if they do everything they can, why the feds couldn't clean it up sooner. Then he'll go inside and watch Hannity or listen to Limbaugh tell him that his taxes are too high and that business, not Washington, can solve all his problems.

And BP? Those fuckers (and the oil rig operator, Transocean) benefited like corrupt cops at a whorehouse in the way they abused the ludicrous, worthless self-regulation system. Does the phrase "police themselves" actually have any meaning? Because, see, if the Rude Pundit were to police himself, he'd say, "Well, gee, RP, as long as you only have just a little pot, coke, and ecstasy on hand and the goat you sacrificed for the blood orgy didn't suffer much, we can overlook it all. Don't kill any people, and we're good."

Part 3 will no doubt be along when the pot, coke, and Ecstasy kick in. Or the goat.

Having been on the PTSD rollercoaster for 5 years of my life, I can spot the signs. It's time to get Michael Ware out of Iraq and find him some help. I love the guy and the job he's done over there, but for the last few months it's been obvious (to me anyway) he's losing his grip. I'd hate to see such a capable, talented journalist (there are so few of them as it is) completely come apart at the seams.

In addition to having taken a break recently in order to work on his book, it is no secret that he has been grappling with PTSD, brought on from the hellish years he worked in Baghdad. I was told that, unfortunately, when he needed more time off in order to deal with things, his request was denied. So he will not be returning.

The draconian Arizona law SB 1070 is finally reaching the players of MLB. San Diego's slugging starter Adrian Gonzalez has come out publicly and said that he will not play the 2011 All Star game if the law goes into effect. The outrage that we've felt over this barbaric law has filtered down to into The Sports Villagers now, because on ESPN's Mike & Mike in the Morning radio show they spent a lot of time discussing this topic, and it is raging.

The time is a-coming for Bud Selig to take a stand on this issue. Baseball has already proven that it can be a leader in advancing civil rights in America, so this should be right up their alley. The MLB have a hugely profitable Cactus League in Arizona where 15 teams us their facilities for Spring Training games, and they also host Arizona fall-league games. It's a yearlong operation. Studies have shown that the MLB is comprised of as much as 27 percent Latino players, and the league's 9 percent African Americans could be targeted by the new law as well. [my em]

Good article at Slate on military humor in the electronic age. Many links.

A brief history of soldiers posting ridiculous dance routines on the Internet.

We've posted lots of 'em.

It's also safe to say that soldiers in drag dancing to Lady Gaga wasn't what the Pentagon expected when it recently revised its social media policies. [...]

The Pentagon has never had a clue what goes on in the 'other ranks'. On the one hand, I kinda wish we'da had the internet and video cameras in my service days. On the other hand, I'm damn glad we didn't. Heh. I have no idea what went on in the other services although I've heard rumors, but we didn't dance much, so all there would have been on YouTube was thousands of videos of us lighting farts. Hint: wear skivvies or apply lots of anti-flashback cream.

Wash only 15 items of laundry per week. Roll up the semi-wet clean clothes in a ball. Place them in a cloth sack in the corner of the garage where the cat pees. After a week, unroll them and without ironing or removing the mildew, proudly wear them to professional meetings and family gatherings. Pretend you don't know what you look or smell like. Enthusiastically repeat the process for another week.

Another e-mail forward gives a good idea of how troops in Afghanistan perceive their Islamist foes. A sample: "You maybe Taliban if … You refine heroin for a living, but you have a moral objection to beer" or "You have more wives than teeth." [...]

Taliban, shit. Sounds like fundies with a meth lab and Mormons.

Enjoy. I've got things to do today. There's a shipping container on my front lawn that mysteriously appeared overnight and I must investigate...

There are very few times I'm rendered speechless. This is one of them:

School districts in Arizona are under orders from the state's Department of Education to remove from classrooms teachers who speak English with a very heavy accent or whose speech is ungrammatical.

Officials say they want students who don’t know much English to have teachers who can best model how to speak the language, but, according to The Wall Street Journal, some principals and administrators are concerned that the standards for removal are arbitrary.

Before I gotta do all the things I couldn't yesterday (like paying the ransom picking up my dog, for instance).

I knew Rush was a lowlife, slime mold of a person. I'm very cynical about conservatives in general, always expecting lies, hypocrisy, and false equivalency, but this takes the cake:

One of the more idiotic memes floating around of late is that the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is somehow “Obama’s Katrina.” Liberal NY Times columnist Paul Krugman first raised the specter as a joke, after which right-wing loon Rush Limbaugh followed suit…albeit without the sense of irony.

...

You know, if Lintball would listen to Dr. Krugman when it mattered, we wouldn't be in half the shit we are right now.

And just a question or two:

Shouldn't this show us, after the obvious effects of burning things (especially oil) on the climate, that drilling for oil in our offshore waters is a recipe for environmental disaster?

Shouldn't it also show us, after the banking scandal that nearly brought down the economy, that we should never trust corporations who are accountable to their bottom line to police themselves?

Sunday, May 2, 2010

Satellite bandwidth sucked aboard and time got away from me and we're home. Unpacking, grabbing a pizza (a real, genuine NY pizza, not the cheap imitation aboard ship) and I'll be back to join the fray. I'll have pics of the pub crawl and around the ship.

The bomb actually tried to go off but the chain of events malfunctioned, which leads me to believe that this was an effort by a RWNJ or someone who is angry at Bank Of America, probably with good reason.

If a real terrorist outfit, whether foreign or homegrown, had been behind this, Times Square would be a smoking ruin. They know how to build bombs that work.

DON’T blame it all on Arizona. The Grand Canyon State simply happened to be in the right place at the right time to tilt over to the dark side. Its hysteria is but another symptom of a political virus that can’t be quarantined and whose cure is as yet unknown.

The crowd that wants Latinos to show their papers if there’s a “reasonable suspicion” of illegality is often the same crowd still demanding that the president produce a document proving his own citizenship. [...]...

To the “Take Back America” right, the illegitimate Obama is Illegal Alien No. 1. [...]

McCain, like Arizona, shouldn’t be singled out for censure: He is far from alone in cowering before his party’s extremists. ...

There are few profiles in courage among the leaders in this G.O.P. — only a lot of guys hiding under their desks.

The one group of Republicans that has been forthright in criticizing the Arizona law is the Bush circle: Jeb Bush, the former speechwriter Michael Gerson, the Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge, the adviser Mark McKinnon and, with somewhat more equivocal language, Karl Rove. McKinnon and Rove know well that Latino-bashing will ultimately prove political suicide in a century when Hispanic Americans are well on their way to becoming the largest minority in the country and are already the swing voters in many critical states.

The Bushies, however, have no power and no juice in the new conservative order. The former president is nearly as reviled in some Tea Party circles as Obama is. [...]

Well, at least they got that part right. Where were they when they could have done some good? Oh, that's right - the southern white racist party was in control. That was fine with them.

Gordon

Fixer

Followers

Get the Brain in your Inbox

Brain Search

Masthead Art

"... That's US here at the Brain! Sittin' all alone out in the cold, thanklessly freezin' our beboops off, lookin' for a chance to lob a few at the enemy and praying for a secondary explosion, wonderin' if it's all worth it or if it will make any difference in the scheme of things ..." - Gordon